(Not Quite) Out to Pasture: The Problem with Memory

A COLUMN BY: CURTIS COMER

This morning I woke up in my parent’s house, in my old bedroom and in my old bed. I Knew I was there because I could hear a freight train passing by on the tracks at the foot of the hill, below our house. Somehow, it was 1983 again and, although it made no sense, Tim was there I my bed with me. I opened my eyes and peered into the semi-darkness, only to realize that I wasn’t in my parent’s house, I was in my house in St. Louis and the freight train that I heard was a couple of blocks away, to the south. I quickly squeezed my eyes shut and hugged Tim under the warm blankets, preferring my flashback to reality. At least in 1983 my mom could still be found sleeping one floor below me, my sister, Jill, was just down the hall in her own room and I didn’t have to worry about meddlesome adult matters, like car payments and mortgages. And, in my flashback fantasy, Tim was there, too, like a big old cuddly Teddy bear, only better.  As I lay there, eyes squeezed shut and filled with a dreamy coziness, I tried to convince myself that, somehow, I had managed to go back in time with Tim in tow, but I couldn’t.  Like a dream, which is probably how it all started in the first place, it was gone. Mom’s since passed away and the only way I can see Jill is if she flies here or if I go to Las Vegas.

But as I shaved my face, having finally extricated myself from the warmth of our bed, I wondered what the hell I had been thinking. I mean, would I really want to go back to my life in 1983? All nostalgia aside, my childhood wasn’t exactly the sort of thing I would choose to relive. I mean, my family was not a model family. In fact, the word dysfunction comes easily to mind and, sadly, the passage of forty-three years has done little to change that. On the other hand, I’m no longer the scrawny little nerd I was when I was a kid. Okay, maybe I’m still a bit underweight but, at an age when weight gain can be counted on like the rising and setting of the sun, I no longer consider this a bad thing. But, as a kid, especially in junior high, I was really, really skinny, so skinny that I barely had an ass. To make matters worse for a skinny kid of average height, I was forced to wear glasses at an early age and was horribly shy and introverted. As a result I was mercilessly picked upon by the older boys at my school. Titles like “nerd,” “four eyes,” “fag” and “bookworm” might as well have been printed on all of my shirts just to save bullies the time of repeating them every time I appeared in the hallway.

Not surprisingly, some of my closest friends in junior high and high school were girls and, as fate would have it, I and three of my “girl friends”  along with our friend, Joey (who may have been gayer than even me),were all talked into joining the Future Farmers of America at the same time.

That’s right….the FFA.

Now, I had never for a minute of my (then) short life contemplated a future in agriculture. Law, maybe; writing, sometimes; acting, most definitely.  But, in our small farming community, all students were required to take one semester of Vocational Agriculture. Mr. Carey, the Vocational Agriculture teacher, insisted that we join the FFA and promised that we would “learn a lot from the experience.”

Learn a lot I did. For the duration of the semester I was forced to assist in the castration of pigs (and watch Joey faint in the process), learn how to weld and how to properly handle pesticides, most of which have since been banned as carcinogens by most forward-thinking states. The older boys, who we referred to as “Aggies,” a shortening of the word “agriculture” and suggested that they were in it for the long-haul or prison, whichever came first, were a loathsome lot. Any of us younger boys was a potential target for their psychotic sport, which might include throwing a hammer at you to see how quickly you could duck or firing a nail gun in your direction for much the same reason. The logic of placing us younger students among these miscreants was lost on me. I imagine it’s not far from the “fresh meat” attitude of older prisoners in penal institutions.  Had this scenario occurred to me in my pubescence, I would have found the fantasy titillating. Instead, I feared that I would, at any given moment, have my head bashed by a hammer.

Mr. Carey was a tall, quiet man who, despite how much I loathed his class, I admired. He wasted no time coming to the rescue of a younger student who had been singled out for sport by the older boys. One afternoon, he did just that for me when he found me dodging a hot welding rod, which was being held dangerously close to my face by Allen, a senior. Allen was notorious for picking on younger students and, for all I know, is still a senior at the high school. Or in maximum security lockdown, either guess is bound to be correct.

“Stop that!” bellowed Mr. Carey. “That’s dangerous and somebody could get hurt very badly with your stupid assed shenanigans!”

As he berated the obviously unrepentant senior, occasionally inserting words that would have made a seasoned drill sergeant blush and repeating safety protocol, I stood to one side smiling and nodding my head at what I felt were appropriate points. When Mr. Carey had finished his tirade, his face red, he turned to see my smiling, my hands on my hips.

“What are you smiling at?” he snapped. “This isn’t a game, you know!”

In the end, the only significant things that I learned were to a) never cut the testicles off of pigs on a full stomach and to b) stay away from the older boys when they were wielding hot welding rods.  After that first semester, my self-esteem in tatters, I elected not to take a second semester, opting instead for an advanced art class.

Fortunately, my voice eventually changed, I replaced the glasses with contact lenses, I began to put on weight and I moved to San Francisco, far, far away from farmland.

When I hear people much older than me, wistfully pining for something they refer to as “the good old days,” I have to wonder just where the hell these people grew up. I mean, was there ever really a time in history when everything was “good?”
I suppose that that’s the problem with memory. Caught up in a wave of nostalgia, a yearning for “simpler times,” we forget to make clear distinctions: Jazz was good but segregation was bad; Swing Bands were good but the Holocaust was bad; Sal Mineo may have been a good actor, but the times dictated that he live a closeted life. Once upon a time (in the “good old days”) if an actress began to look a little too old for the Hollywood big shots, they would put Vaseline on the camera lens to “soften” her features. These days, thankfully, actresses are, for the most part, allowed to age gracefully.

The feeling that I had awakened in my childhood home is still somehow comforting, even if it’s only really because I long for times when I had fewer cares. I suppose I’ll always have fond recollections of my childhood, no matter how much Vaseline I have to put on that lens.

You can email Curtis at Greenwitchsf@aol.com